What are you looking forward to?

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

Wow. You look like my freind Drew. Or at least, you remind me of him.

yeah, get some more professional ones done if you're serious about acting.

[Entsuropi]

Oh great. They chose one of the most obnoxious fantasy series's i know to make into a set of films.

Hoo - f***ing - ray.

[fuzzyoctopus]

Runelords?  If you find Runelords annoying, I shudder to think how you find some other series...

[EUOL]

Runelords has its flaws.  However, it does have some good things for it.

1) Good, interesting magic system.
2) (And I mean this in a nice way.)  Simple straightforward plot, easily adapted to a medium that requires a lot of editing.  
3) It was written by a guy many of us know on a first-name basis.

[EUOL]

You know, Gemm, I always pictured you as looking something like Francis from PvP.

[Entsuropi]

Ditto.

Runelords magic system is what annoyed me so much.

[EUOL]

It annoyed me too, but in a good way.  I thought it was incredibly clever--the way it was incorporated into the economic, political, and social system of the world.  I was annoyed because it made me uncomfortable when the 'good' guys used it.  However, I call this 'good' annoyance because it was 'in-world' annoyance.  I was annoyed at the characters, not at poor handling of the system.

[fuzzyoctopus]

I was annoyed that I read the first book, enjoyed it, then tried to read the second book and got frustrated after half-way through ABSOLUTELY NOTHING had happened.

So I still need to read the other two books if they're not going to make them into movies so I can cheat.

[Entsuropi]

The second book has a siege i remember, against big tyranid things.

The magic system annoyed me because it offended my sense of Honour. The Hero's cannot defeat the enemy by using their own abilities, they steal the abilities of a huge group of random peasants and thus the most powerful guy becomes the guy with the biggest collection of peasants (and branding sticks as i remember). And the method by which the magic system works is just reprehensible. Nobody who uses that deserves to be called a hero. Compared to something like LOTR, where the hero's have practically no outside modifiiers - very little magic swords or buffs - and thus achieve their goals by pure ability and skill alone. That is heroism, not branding a bunch of peasants until you have haste permanently cast on yourself.

I seem to remember that the characterisation was moderately dull as well.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

i wrote a whole paper on this

Despite having a signed copy of book 1, I've not read it. However, while it's perfectly fine to not enjoy a work because it doesn't conform to your conceptions of heroism, that hardly seems a reason to say the work as a whole is no good. It can still include engaging conflicts and moral decisions. Heroism is only one of many many many potential themes, even in epic fantasy. If it's only about heroism, well, we used up most of what we can say in the works of Howard and Tolkien

[Fellfrosch]

The thing I liked about the magic system was that it offered a great metaphor for leadership, and gave good opportunities for discussion of power and responsibility. The hard truth of medieval warfare is that the strongest king was the one with more people and more money; a good leader is one who best uses the skills and abilities of his followers. Runelords simply took that concept and made it direct and literal.

[Spriggan]

well Dave has a director now:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/film/brief_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000450662

[Fellfrosch]

Hot diggity dog--this is the coolest live action anime I've ever seen. You may consider me officially looking forward to it.

http://www.apple.co.jp/quicktime/trailers/casshern_large.html

[Gemm: Rock & Roll Star; Born to Rock]

Wow diddly! Spriggan translate! Although, it could just be another flashey Japanese movie. I'm not sure if anyone has ever seen a live action Japanese movie... but they aren't the greatest of actors. They're wonderful voice actors.... but the acting was.... bad.

[Spriggan]

ya Japanese live action movies usaly realy suck.  Godzilla's are usealy the crownjewels of their feild (and I'm not makeing that up).  One of the resons is bugets and actualy geting them finaced.  Movies are, on adverage, $20 a shot there, and most people don't see Japanese flicks.  On the other hand, Titanic was in the theaters there for over a year.  The thing that's helped lately is US production companies buying the rights to remake Japanese films (the ring, shall we dance).  So there's a revival in the marked there.

I do think its funny that the first thing they say about the movie (in the text below, I don't have sound so I can't tell you whats going on there) is that the director is the same one who did Utada Hirkaru's music videos (Hirkaru is probaly the most famous Japanese-american over there, well ok she's probaly as popular as brittney spears over there).  The text dosen't say much about the movie, just that it's a remake of some show from the 70's, and I know you're going to laugh at this but I don't know how else to translate this, "New Structure Human Casshern" is the full name.  And he;s some immortal, I think I'm reading that right, that fights for humanity.